The gyms in your city, and the crews that hold them

Four factions, and none of them is the strong one

You pick a faction when you join: Physique, Strength, Performance, or Longevity. It is a declaration of how you train, not a class with better stats.

Every week of a season contests one terrain (volume, intensity, engine, or foundation) and each faction's home terrain comes up exactly as often as everyone else's. A powerlifter has a big intensity week and a normal engine week; a runner has the reverse. Over a season nobody's discipline is the meta, because the schedule is fixed and public before the season starts.

You can switch factions during settlement week, at the end of a season. Not mid-week, when you can see who is winning.

Holding a gym is a team result, not a leaderboard finish

Crews hold gyms. A crew is a handful of people who train at the same place, and the gym goes to the crew putting the most into it, not to whoever lifts the most in absolute terms.

Contribution is normalized before it counts. It blends what you did against your own recent training with what you did in absolute terms, so a beginner having a genuinely great month is not drowned out by an advanced lifter coasting. Crew size is square-rooted, so a crew of twenty is stronger than a crew of five without being four times stronger. Recruiting is worth something, but training is worth more.

Holds decay. A crew that stops training loses the gym slowly whether or not anyone challenges them, which is why a gym is something you keep rather than something you won once.

Sieges: a declared, time-boxed fight over one gym

A crew declares a siege on a gym another crew holds. It runs for a fixed window, both sides accumulate contribution at that gym, and at the end the higher score takes it. One active siege per gym, so a held gym cannot be dogpiled by five crews at once.

Sieges cost fuel, which you earn by training. That is the whole spam control: you cannot declare a war you have not earned, and a crew that only picks fights runs out.

Everyone involved gets told: the siege starting, the siege closing, and how it ended. A siege you never heard about is a siege you lose by default, so notifications for it are on by default.

Presence, and what MuscleBuddy does not keep

Checking in at a gym makes a session count more toward that gym. It is a weight, never a gate: a session logged from anywhere still counts for the gym you set, it just counts less than one you were verifiably at.

Your location is resolved to a gym and then discarded. MuscleBuddy never stores your coordinates. The fix exists for the moment it takes to answer "which gym is this?" and is gone after that. What is kept is the gym, the day, and the score.

Boards suppress themselves below a handful of participants, so a city with four lifters in it never turns a leaderboard into a personal disclosure.

Free, because a map with nobody on it is worthless

The whole competitive system is free: the map, factions, crews, holds, sieges, seasons, and the faction forums. Paywalling a network effect strangles it.

Pro adds analytics on top: your contribution history broken down terrain by terrain, what each session was actually worth, and how your crew's weighting works. That is a power-user read on a system everybody plays.